فصلنامه تحقیقات فرهنگی ایران
سال پانزدهم شماره 3 (پیاپی 59، پاییز 1401)

Knowledge and perspective about cultural studies have been debated extensively in the global academic spaces and partly within Iran. However, the pedagogical requirements of this tradition have rarely been a topic for discussion. As a matter of fact, cultural studies’ project inevitably requires teaching critical skills and analyses in classrooms. Relying on educational experiences of the author, the current paper aims to introduce some major challenges in the process of cultural studies pedagogy. Reliance on a formal teaching separated from social context, ambivalence and confusion on the concept of culture and cultural theory, difficulties in providing critical teaching and drawing boundaries of popular culture are amongst the major challenges faced by academics attached with cultural studies in Iran. It therefore can be argued that to be efficient and dynamic, and to preserve its distinction as a critical discipline, cultural studies needs today to employ educational initiatives that not only serve multi-layered historical understanding of Iranian society and culture but also fit with a reformistic cultural policy-making.

The dramatic changes that have taken place in the field of information and communication in the present age have led to fundamental changes in various parts of human life. The important point is that the emergence of virtual technologies is not just a conventional technical development but contains a cultural nature. The university is also one of the institutions that has been particularly affected by these developments. Such conditions have changed the relationship between students and professors, their way of accessing information and resources, creating and sharing educational content, and so on. The purpose of this article is to study the experience of virtualization and academic culture. This is a qualitative research that has applied a phenomenological method with semi-structured interviews. Participants were purposefully selected from among students, graduates, faculty members, and university administrators. Data were analyzed using the thematic analysis technique which resulted in 10 semantic clusters. The results of the interviews show a duality in responses, with some interviewees emphasizing the functions of virtualization in university culture in terms of communication, education and lifestyle. They believe that virtualization has opened doors to universities. The other category, however, explains the negative consequences of virtualization in academic culture and its various dimensions. The results indicate that with virtualization, important changes have occurred in various dimensions of the university culture that should be considered at micro and macro levels.

Prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, the commencement camp in the beginning of the new academic year was considered to be one of the unique and distinct traditions of the Sharif University of Technology. This paper is the product of a research designed to study the impact of holding such an event on the sociocultural atmosphere of this university during 2002 and 2019. For this purpose, this research uses a twofold conceptual model consisting of “explicit cultural goals” and “implicit social patterns”. The main research question is that what was the explicit cultural goals and implicit social patterns of the planners and moderators of the camping, and what is students' reaction to that? To respond to the first question, interviews with main planners, and content analysis of official proposals and documents were used. For the second question, qualitative method was applied by interviewing 40 undergraduate students and an electronic survey of about 400 students graduated from the university. Findings show that while explicit cultural goals was presenting cultural contents to introduce several aspects of new academic life style, campus issues and useful educational information; some explicit social patterns were repeating each year: “Monopoly in administration, planning and managing of the event by the religious student organizations such as Basij and Hey’at”, “key role of religious senior group of camp leaders in making new social relations and cultural guidance”, “emphasis on camping in Holy religious city of Mashhad in religious accommodations dedicated to pilgrims” and “strict gender segregation between women and men”. Gathering the results together, depicts that Sharif University’s camp commencement is acting as a sociocultural suction motor over the past two decades. Beyond just a camping, this event by central organizing of students in a religious network with particular cultural, sociological and ideological identities, with isolating and rejecting the less religious students, had deeply polarized Sharif University of Technology’s community around a specific religious gap, covering other potential sociocultural conflicts.

Open education, in light of an amazing technological development, has transformed the educational system with changes in "educational culture" and an emphasis on the "learner-centered" principle. Since this has not been taken into account in Iran's educational system, the present article critically examines the issue of imperfect construction of an open education system in Iran. To analyze the issue historically, a genealogical method propounded by Foucault has been applied. Genealogy explains the evolution of historical moments in their internal power relations, as Foucault says: it is a discourse which intertwines power and knowledge. The "genealogical analysis" refers to an epistemological strategy formed in various domains of history, political and social sciences. To explain the aforementioned problem, we need to focus on both traditional and modern education discourses in the discursive space of open education. In response to the main question of the article i.e., what could have caused the imperfectness of open education in contemporary Iran? The findings indicate that "neglect to scientific software and discursive aspects", which followed the dominance of instrumental scientific view; "immature understanding of open education" which reduced it to complementary education and "bureaucratic relations" which are in conflict with the democratic character of post-modern education, have all led to the "imperfectness of open education" which has deepened the challenge of the alienation of "science" from culture and society.

Culture, as one of the main components of any social system, has always been exposed to all kinds of reflexivity, and one such case of ideation is related to the promotion of the notion of collapse by the elites. The purpose of this article is to examine what cultural collapse is, and to identify the root cause of it related to the elite community. To achieve this goal, a qualitative study with inductive content analysis was conducted with the participation of 12 academic elites who were experts and had published books on the subject under study. To analyze the data, a thematic analysis was adopted and the data were coded in Atlas.ti8. The findings showed that the use of the idea of cultural collapse has caused conceptual confusion among the elites, and while culture does not disappear but can be accompanied by metamorphosis and change. The roots of this go back to the forms of cultural change, analytical deception, the role of educational centers, the body of power, and the media; and the nature of the idea of collapse is related to the political system and has nothing to do with culture.

Education field experts believe that effects and consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic on education in general and on higher education in particular are not only less than the other social institutions, but are much more comprehensive. In this study, an attempt is being made to represent lived experiences and perceptions of students and teachers in the virtual education system. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to assess the same among professors and students of the University of Isfahan during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to identify the most important challenges of this type of education in universities and by relying on the findings of the study, effective solutions and approaches are presented for improving virtual education in universities. In the course of study, “phenomenology” has been used as a qualitative method whereas the research population includes all students and professors in the University of Isfahan in the academic year of 2020-2021. Total participants in the qualitative part of research were 32 people consisting of 14 professors and 18 students. Based on the purposive sampling, a mixture was selected and interviewed. The data was evaluated using Colaizzi’s seven step method (1978).  Findings showed that the damages incurred by virtual education damage are: “educational damage”, “damages related to university culture”, damages related to social-economic infrastructures” and “damage from reduced sense of presence”.